How smartphone sales changed Flipkart’s fortunes

(From left) Flipkart senior director Ayyappan R., senior vice-president (mobiles) Ajay Veer Yadav and senior director Sandeep Karwa. Photo by Abhishek B.A./Mint

Bengaluru: The ‘Like’ feature introduced by social networking platform Facebook in 2009 transformed the company. For Apple, it was the launch of the iPhone in 2007. At Flipkart, India’s start-up darling, that moment came in February 2014 with the sale of Motorola’s Moto G phones.

Sometime in the second half of 2013, Sandeep Karwa, who headed Flipkart’s smartphone business, reached out to two smartphone brands Motorola and Xiaomi to explore talks of launching their products in India. A former college mate of Karwa’s was heading Motorola’s business in India and Karwa had heard from him that Motorola, which was trying to recapture its glory days as a mobile phone icon, was planning to re-enter the Indian market in early 2014.

After discussions that lasted more than six months, Motorola struck a deal to launch the Moto G phones exclusively on the online retailer. It was an experiment. At that time, e-commerce in India was not mainstream. No major smartphone brand or brand of any sort had tried selling online on an exclusive basis, much less through just one e-commerce firm. What helped convince Motorola was that Karwa and his colleagues had given the company a guarantee that Flipkart would sell as many as 125,000 units of Moto G phones in six months.

At midnight on 6 February, Flipkart launched the sale. Within five minutes, the company had sold 10,000 units. In the next 20 minutes, Flipkart’s site had crashed just as it sold another 15,000 units.

 

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